


my heart has no place in this

by dirgewithoutmusic



Series: bringing the war home [5]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies), Thor - All Media Types
Genre: Betrayal, Gen, Sif slowly becoming done with everything, Women of Marvel, warrior women and their scars
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-02
Updated: 2014-06-02
Packaged: 2018-02-03 03:24:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,023
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1729301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dirgewithoutmusic/pseuds/dirgewithoutmusic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The years rolled on, as they always did. Sif had lived through so many now, centuries of war. She had been a child once, she remembered, dreaming of a warrior’s armor and a warrior’s title. They called her Lady Sif now, Guardian of Asgard, and gave deep nods to her in the streets.</p><p>Sif put on her armor in cold mornings and thought, "Once I wished for this." What did she wish for now?</p><p>No matter. She was tired. She was mourning. But she could imagine no life but this. Any other life would make her pale and fade. This one made her burn, iron at the heart of a flame, the heart of a star, and she could imagine no other way worth living.</p><p>(a character study of Lady Sif)</p>
            </blockquote>





	my heart has no place in this

**Author's Note:**

> Some context for people only familiar with the MCU movies:
> 
> 1\. In the comics Sif and Heimdall are siblings; in this story, they are half-siblings. 
> 
> 2\. In Norse mythology, which in Marvel!verse was caused via the Asgardians crashing around old-timey Scandinavia, Sif is not a goddess of battle. She's an earth/crops/grain sort of gal. 
> 
> 3\. Sif plays a major role in the episode "Yes Men" of the Agents of SHIELD TV show;. She comes to Earth tracking an escaped convict, an enchantress named Lorelei with the power to win the loyalty of men with her voice or her touch. With the protagonists' help, Sif captures her. According to Sif's exposition and her arch-nemesis dialogue banter with Lorelei, Lorelei went on a conquering spree with her mind-controlled armies about six hundred years back, during which (among other horrors) Lorelei enchanted Sif's friend/lover Baldur.  
> 3a. I borrowed Melinda May and Sif's conversation from that episode as well, because it's GREAT.

They called her a warrior and Sif thought _what use, what use, what use is that_?

They handed her a sword and she thought _that was already mine._

 

But that was not how this started, of course. Let's go back to the beginning.

 

In the beginning, Heimdall had told her, everything had been darkness.

(Hm, perhaps that's a bit too far.

Let's not start with the story, then, but the man telling it).

Heimdall was the first person Sif told of her plans to pursue a warrior’s place in Asgard’s court. She had been slipping onto the practice courts for decades by then, sparring with Thor and Baldur and the Warriors Three. Some old fogies rolled eyes at her, but on the whole a woman with a sword hardly drew much attention in Asgard.

The place Sif broke with tradition was this: that she not only wanted to play with a sword, but to wield it. She insisted this was not a hobby but a calling. She would be one of the fiercest warriors Asgard had ever seen, a pillar of its defense.

They laughed at her when she told them her plans, except for Hogan, who nodded, and Thor, who grinned wide and clanked a tankard into hers, and Heimdall, who she told first, who said solemnly, “As you will.”

Sometimes Sif tried to figure out what they shared, she and Heimdall. What had their loyal, wandering diplomat of a mother left in both their inheritances?

Sif, a gawky youth, bruised and blistered from practice courts she wasn’t supposed to frequent as much as she did, and ink-splattered from an internship in the Agricultural Corps, sometimes felt like there was nothing they shared. Sif would have given so much, then, to grow up to stand at the same stature as her star-gazing guardian of a big brother.

Heimdall taught her the names of stars, told her secrets and stories. Years later, forcing herself into quick naps in foxholes while Thor took watch and Volstagg snored with one hand on a hilt, Sif would dredge up her brother’s voice and play his stories over and over again to put herself to sleep. 

 

"You got that from your father," her mother liked to tell her, of Sif’s stubbornness, her battle lust, her long dark hair.

They were like marbles into a bag, comments like this and the way Sif squinted at her face in mirrors and tried to pick out which pieces were not her mother’s. They built a lumpy impression of a man Sif did not know.

"Do you know who your father is?" she asked Heimdall.

"Yes. I found him."

"Why?"

"I do not like having blind spots."

 

They were a boisterous crew, with Thor as the burning center of their orbit. Hogan was a diplomat’s son, just as Sif was a diplomat’s daughter. She and Hogan shared stories, sometimes, when Thor and Fandral and Volstagg were off being noisy elsewhere, about being dragged to Realms and back by parents who won wars with words.

Lorelei circled them, teasing and cajoling, practicing her magic and her persuasion. She set them against each other, but she always put them back together in the end. When they pulled pranks, the sun and shadow princes and their lively court, Lorelei was indispensible.

Volstagg, Fandral, and Baldur were Thor’s bright right-hand men. Loki was his shadow, rarely noticed, always there.

He and Sif crossed paths—she sneaking into arms practice and Loki sneaking out. He'd wave and toss up an illusion to help her slip in the back. When whatever simulacrum Loki'd left to cover himself started to fray or falter, she'd trounce Fandral to cover it up. (Fandral lost very loudly).

"Do you ever feel like you don't fit in your own skin?" Sif had asked Heimdall once, pausing to gulp water between practicing sword forms in the empty Bifrost chamber.

Her brother thought about it, big hands resting on the hilt of his upright sword. "I do not live in my skin," he said finally. "My mind flies farther and farther afield, wherever my sight can reach. Do you feel unfit for your body?"

Sif shrugged. She would learn thoughtful stillness from her brother one day, measured attention from her many wars, but not yet. Now, she shifted her weight like the gangly centuries-old adolescent she was and said, "The world and I just disagree about what this skin is for."

She brought it up once, four pitchers into an evening with Thor and the Warriors Three, Lorelei playing wingman for each of them. "Do you ever feel like you don’t fit in your skin?"

Volstagg said, "Well, I had to grow into it," which made Fandral laugh and Thor smash his mug on the ground. Hogan looked thoughtful.

Lorelei sipped her ale and smiled and smiled. When they all tumbled out of the tavern, the morning sun lighting the sky, Lorelei would pull Sif aside and whisper, “I don’t, but I will. I’ll make it fit _me_ , not the other way around.”

Sif never asked it of Loki. She was afraid of what he would do. She was afraid he would look her in the eye and say "yes."

 

Sif learned to hate words. They took her mother away, to a thousand little diplomatic ventures, but the final time to solve a crisis in Jotunheim and calm expansionist tempers. In that Frost Giants’ court, her mother’s words were not able to keep her safe.

There was no body to bury.

 

The Frost Giants tried to take Earth, and the Asgardians stopped them. They went home after the war, but stories of them lingered in those cold northern fjords, turned to myth, to legend, to gods.

In the stories, Thor was a god of thunder, of battle. Odin was wise. Loki, even then, was a mischievous one, god of tricks, but in those days all his magic and maneuvering had been in the service of Asgard.

When they told the stories, over those centuries and centuries before the Asgardians came back to Midgard, Sif was a goddess of the earth, not of battle.

Sif had not earned her armor yet, her shield and sword. Neither had Thor or the Warriors Three, of course, not in anything but the same practice spars she’d fought (and won), but they didn’t have to earn something they had been born with a right to.

Lorelei had offered to use her voice for Asgard’s defense, to turn Frost Giants to their side or summon armies. Odin had flapped a hand at Lorelei, dismissive, a general’s mind on a vast war front and not on the slim, beautiful girl standing in front of him.

(Centuries later, when Lorelei snapped _That’s the difference between me and you, Sif, I don’t follow orders_ in the belly of a SHIELD aircraft, Sif would remember this moment. She would remember Lorelei standing with her loyalty held up in the palms of her delicate hands).

Sif’s boys made war on Midgardian ground, except for Baldur, who had been deemed too distractible and sent to work in the healing tents. Sif had been left with the villagers, a diplomat’s daughter sent to keep peace.

She walked the Midgardians’ fields while smoke rose from battlefield and the screams of ice cracking sounded in the distance. She was an earth goddess, they said, so she buried her hands deep in the soil. She let the little Midgardians teach her about their crops and cycles, their long summer days and frozen winter nights.

She used her double-bladed staff as a walking stick, the blades retracted inside of it. Sif leant on it and watched the smoke rise and thought  _if they come, if they come, I will be the last defense._

The thing about being the last defense was that they sung no songs in your honor if you lost. 

Well, she’d just have to not lose.

 

It was after the war with the Frost Giants that Sif began her true efforts to earn official status as a warrior.

( _Warrior_ was all she was looking for, but not all that she got—Lady of War, they called her. Sif, goddess of earth, dropped off the radar. She was the patron of battle and bloodshed. She would be at war all her days. She would never come home from it, not really).

It took decades, sparring with this famed warrior and that one, doing weapons exhibitions and fighting skirmishes at Thor’s side as an “apprentice.” When she’d beaten enough of them in trial combat and saved enough of their lives in real battle, they called her into Odin’s throne room and gave her the title she was seeking.

But Sif had been fighting all her life.

In the great shining hall of Odin’s throne room, they handed her a sword she’d blistered and bled on for centuries already. “Lady Sif,” Odin announced solemnly, Thor beaming at his right shoulder and Loki smiling, softly, at his left. “Warrior maiden of Asgard.”

Applause pummeled at Sif’s taut skin, but she wrapped her hands around her blade and stood as still and as steady as her brother. She had fought long centuries to reach this place, but now that she was here she wasn’t sure she cared. She had a sword in her hands. It was her sword, heavy but balanced, and these were just words he was laying at her feet.

“My king,” she said. “You have my service and my gratitude.”

 

Sif cursed her eyes for every long day of Lorelei’s war. She should have seen it. She should have seen how Lorelei’s tricks had grown crueler and crueler. She should have seen this coming, seen the bitterness and hate growing in her friend, tucked into the curl of her gold hair, written onto her smooth palms.

But she hadn’t. Sif didn’t know of Lorelei’s betrayal until a soldier who had served the realm with twenty long centuries tried to stab Odin through in the throne room. Thor knocked him aside and Loki put a knife to the soldier’s throat.

“For my lady,” the man choked out, grabbed Loki’s hand, and slit his own jugular.

It was a long war. It was a dirty one. If Sif had had any love left for words, it burned away in those terrible years.

Lorelei scraped destruction across the face of the universe, dragging armies behind her with nothing but her throbbing voice. Sif went after her, on quiet, poorly manned missions. Sif cleaned her two blades and polished them and kept them close.

War with Lorelei stripped Sif down to her core. Her men were all either hidden away or lost to Lorelei’s ranks. When the numbers of warriors unsusceptible to Lorelei’s voice had dwindled too far for hope, Sif pulled Thor, Baldur and the Warriors Three out into the field. She gave them beeswax to clog their ears.

Sif heard the Midgardian story about sirens on the rocks from Darcy, centuries later. Odysseus, idiot, wanted to hear their song. _Beeswax_ , thought Sif. _Beeswax and arrows. Shoot them down, until the seas are safe._

Lorelei had liked to tuck Sif’s hair out of her face, when they were small, and grin at her. “No hiding,” she’d scold. “You’re brave everywhere else, Sif, be brave for me.”

Sif took Odin’s orders and drew out battle plans, sent troops out, burned the bodies. She wanted to find Lorelei and slam her against a wall by those slim, soft shoulders, and say, “I was brave. I was brave when I went to war against someone I love, when I ordered funeral pyres set for the bodies you leave behind you, I am brave when Fandral stares into his ale so long I swear he thinks he can will himself back to before all this began. I was brave when I sent Baldur out, and you touched him, and _turned_ him, and I was brave when he died on my sword. Are you proud of me yet, Lor?”

Sif replayed her brother’s deep voice and old stories in her head at night, to let herself feel safe enough to be able to sleep. She wondered again what they shared, what half a parentage had left in each of them. They both had steady feet, which was funny when you considered their mother’s wandering soul.

Her brother was a fixed point, the pivot on which the universe turned. She had taken that truth and made it part of herself. Sif would be the fixed point, here, on the ground, centering the Warriors Three, tethering Thor’s wildest fancies down to actual battle plans.

Heimdall looked out and Sif could never tell what he saw. She didn’t follow his gaze, but she let him teach her how to keep her eyes wide open. Her feet were planted here. This was her ground, her earth, her defense.

Sif polished her sword and went to war. They won. They would none of them ever be the same again.

Sif did not go to watch as they put Lorelei in the deepest dungeons, her golden collar keeping her mute. She did not want to see it. She did not want to hear that prison door slam shut. With her bright eyes and gold hair, Lorelei had always looked like she had her face upturned to the light. Sif did not want to see that door slam shut.

Sif went down to the practice courts and slammed straw dummies again and again, til her feet blistered, til her hands bruised. She tried not to imagine how that hate would look in Lorelei’s clear eyes.

Sif pushed her sweaty hair out of her face and told herself, “Be brave.”

 

There was peace in Asgard, until Thor’s inheritance ceremony and the Frost Giants’ attack. Sif was pleased then with an opportunity to raise her sword against the blue armies she’d only been allowed to watch pillage, back on Earth.

When they got back, Loki’s masks started to fall away or something new started brewing in him. Sif was never sure which.

No, she was, she was. She just didn’t want to think it, to match the shy grins they’d shared, sneaking past each other into and out of weapons practice—she didn’t want to match that with the way he smirked at them from the throne, the way he slipped through Thor’s fingers.

Loki had always been torn between escape and control.  

And Sif had always seen Loki's jealousy. She was not her brother but she had eyes.

She had a warrior's eyes. She saw battle and she saw weakness, and she measured her life out in loyalties answered. That was not less pure than Fandral’s quick wit or Thor's easy bravery.

 

“You would break every oath you have taken as warriors and commit treason to bring Thor back?” asked her brother. Sif and the Warriors Three tried not to cower before him.

Heimdall had taught Sif how to be as solid as the ground under their feet. He had told her stories and watched her fight her way to this armor and this weapon in her hands. He had never doubted her. He listened. He looked past her, further out, but he saw all of her.

There was no one Sif would hate disappointing more.

"Yes," she said. 

She could have sworn he smiled. There was no one who looked more closely at Heimdall than Sif. 

"Huh," said Fandrall as Heimdall walked away from his guard post and left them standing in the empty Bifrost chamber. "Complicated fellow, isn't he?"

Sif might have said "Not really," but they had a friend to go save.

Disobedience ran in the family. Far sight ran in the family. As she marched off to Midgard and war, Sif could feel her brother's approving gaze on her armored back. 

 

The last time Sif had been in Midgard she had been a goddess of the earth, of growing things. Now she was a goddess of war.

Thor was Lord of thunder, they said. Hammer, flight, and lightning—Thor's greatest strengths, they said, and Sif disagreed. 

His strength was not the hammer. She would follow him to the ends of every Realm not for the might of his hammer but for the might of the heart that was allowed to pick the hammer up.

He called lightning from the sky, sure, but that was all pomp and circumstance and destruction. Sif was more impressed with how he called the best out of other people. He made her brave. His easy grin and warmth had taken three wayward fighters and made them the Warriors Three, loyal and jovial and bright emblems of the best of the Realms.  

She met Thor’s eyes crouched behind a shining vehicle on a dusty Midgard street. This was the closest he would ever be to her. He was grounded. He was only his hands and his big big heart and those things had always been what she loved most in him.

Thor told her to go. War had come to this little desert town for him, and he would go out to meet it.

“Sif, you’ve done all you could,” said Thor.

“No. I’ll die a warrior’s death. Stories will be told of this day.”

“Live, and tell those stories yourself.” _Tell mine_.

 _The boy king, weaponless, lost_ , thought Sif. _The storm cloud withering to nothing on the desert, but bringing rain._ My _king._

Thor had never looked more serious. She had never been this heartbroken. She had never been this proud. 

She was an earth goddess, even here, even now with centuries of blood and battle on her hands. Sif twisted her soles on the dust of that New Mexico street and gripped her sword. If she could not defend this land she wanted to die on it. One way or another she would pour life's blood into the dry ground.

She was the last defense.

She would defend this earth or she would bleed out on it. There were only two options here. She would be a life giver all her days.

Thor was looking at her, those bright eyes for once serious, solid, steady. He had no hammer, no lightning—but this was it, wasn't it? The reason she'd followed him all these years. He looked at her and she felt like there was more point to her than the blood she was willing to spill.

Thor stepped out to face Loki’s destroyer, and Sif moved on to keep shepherding civilians and looking for a second attack (she wouldn’t put it past Loki). She would save lives tonight, as many as she could. She would live up to her name.

Thor offered his life for theirs, laid it out at his brother’s feet. He bled into the dirt of that little New Mexico town. Jane Foster wept over him but Sif stood, stood and stood and stared.

She hadn’t thought Loki would really do it. But she should have learned by now, shouldn’t she have? Lorelei had taught her. Baldur’s blood on her own sword had taught her. If the kindest of them wasn’t immortal, why would the bravest of them be?

Thor took a breath, and the god of thunder came rushing back into place. More importantly, he opened his eyes.

Sif shut hers.

 

They won Earth, they went home, they lost Loki. They went home. Even the walls seemed written over with it. It was like coming back from Lorelei’s war all over again, looking at every spot Lorelei had ever laughed in, every patch of floorboard where Loki and Sif had once passed each other on their ways out and into arms practice.

The halls were filled with feasting and light and Sif felt each cheer like a punch to the gut. Thor did, too, she could see it (she had her brother’s eyes). When he got up to leave the hall, she followed but Frigga stopped her just outside.

Sif’s nerves were racing, still thinking her in a battle (she was, she was, she would never not be). Frigga smiled, softly, and Sif remembered that this woman was where Loki had learned every ounce of grace in him.

“My queen,” said Sif. “I am so sorry for your loss.”

Frigga’s eyes trailed after Thor’s retreating frame. “How is he?”

There was sorrow in Sif's throat, confusion and loss and exhaustion, but there was room for a little stir of pride. Frigga, wise lovely Frigga, knew that if anyone could answer that question it would be the maiden who was Thor's right hand sword. 

 

The years rolled on, as they always did. Sif had lived through so many now, centuries of war. She had been a child once, she remembered, dreaming of a warrior’s armor and a warrior’s title. They called her Lady Sif now, Guardian of Asgard, and gave deep nods to her in the streets.

She put on her armor in cold mornings and thought _once I wished for this._ What did she wish for now?

No matter. She was tired. She was mourning. But she could imagine no life but this. Any other life would make her pale and fade. This one made her burn, iron at the heart of a flame, the heart of a star, and she could imagine no other way worth living.

Sif stopped in the middle of a exercise on the practice courts to gulp water and found an unexpected pair of eyes watching her. Frigga stepped onto the court, uncertain in starched practice gear, and said, “I’m sure I won’t have any cause to use it, but I would like to learn swordplay.”

“It is a good skill, my queen,” Sif agreed stiffly.

Frigga laughed, a light sound. “I am asking you to teach me, child.”

“Surely Thor, or your husband—“

“Odin would only laugh at me if I asked, the half-blind fool,” she said. When Sif stared, Frigga said, “But he is my blind fool, you see. And Thor— he has never had to learn how to _become_ strong. I would like you to teach me, Sif.”

“Of course, my queen.”

That laugh again. “I would like you to call me Frigga.”

 

Thor missed the human scientist. It was very obvious. Sif wasn’t sure whether to find it concerning or funny. She kept turning to share an amused look with Loki at his brother's expense, only to remember with a cold stab to her gut what her life was these days. She had stopped turning to share smirks with Lorelei, but even that had taken the first few years of war to sink in fully.

When the call for aid came from Midgard, the Bifrost was still broken. Thor begged and cajoled for days before Odin gave in. Thor was bad at cajoling and Sif was grateful, for Lorelei and Loki both had been so very good at it.

Thor left. He came back with a muzzled Loki at his side. Loki looked older, thinner, exhausted. He had the same smile, even if Sif could not see it behind the muzzle. He quirked his eyebrows at her and that was enough. She did not follow them down to watch him locked away either.

She kept up with Frigga’s sword lessons. The queen did not try to discuss Loki with her. Sif went out on skirmishes and listened to Thor mope obviously over Jane. Odin started sending her on diplomatic missions as well and something churned in her gut when he first gave her the orders. Winning wars with words was the province of Lorelei and Loki. Sif just wanted her sword.

 

Trouble came to Asgard. Jane Foster came, and the aether with her. Malekith came and left death behind him, strewn on high walks, in the great hall, on the floor of the queen’s private rooms.

 

They buried their dead the same place Loki had fallen to his first death. They sent Frigga out on her bloom-bedecked boat.

Thor had insisted his mother ride out to the stars with a sword in her hands, and then he had pressed the blade into Sif’s hands. “Take it to her.”

The balance of the blade was familiar in her hands. Sif had chosen the design. Sif had bickered with smiths for weeks about material and cut and hilt, finding ash on her pillow in the morning because she hadn’t fully managed to wash the smithy out of her hair.

The first time Frigga had wrapped slim fingers around her sword and lifted it into perfect guard position, Sif had been so proud. Frigga had smiled, shyly, looking for approval, and Sif had almost drowned in the idea that anyone would look to her.

Sif did not look at Odin as she stepped up to Frigga’s body. She did not want to know if he hated her for putting a sword in his wife’s hands or for not teaching her enough to live.

Sif wrapped Frigga’s cold hands around the hilt for one last time. “You used it well, my lady,” she whispered. “You were so brave.”

Loki had fallen, here, off the very edge of their world. The darkness had eaten him up and spat him back, twisted, broken and full of hate.

Sif stood on the wide street, a crowd of mourners pressed in around her, and watched Frigga’s burning boat sail off the same edge of the world. A burst of light sparked upward and outward, dancing away among the stars. Sif wondered how Frigga would find her way back to them. As a tree? As a sparrow? A touch of starlight on an upturned cheek?

Sif kept her eyes unblinking until the light had faded. Her eyes watered and swam with the effort, but she didn’t dare miss a joule of Frigga’s light. If she did, Sif was sure her heart would break. Tears wet her cheeks. She was Heimdall’s sister. You honored things by seeing them.

When the light finally went out, she squeezed her aching eyes shut and didn’t open them again until she felt Thor’s warm hand on her shoulder.

 

Sif and the Warriors Three snuck Loki, Thor, and Jane out of Asgard and then remained to guard the home base. They stopped Malekith, but they lost Loki. Thor tried to tell boomingly grand stories of Jane’s heroic science, but even in the midst of that Sif could hear the loss in his throat. Thor abdicated, and Sif thought she understood.

Odin, having lost his wife and lost his youngest son, seemed sharper somehow. Sif continued in his service, a warrior of the realm, and Thor came with her on more missions than not.

“Jane calls me an multi-world contractor,” Thor told her. He wanted to bring Jane to Asgard, to study. When he told her this, Sif tried her best to emulate her brother’s expressionless face.

“Jane Foster is a child,” said Odin and Sif agreed. Odin sighed. “And I suppose that means she is harmless. If this is your wish, Thor.”

When Thor was caught up in a diplomatic mission, Sif took a trip to Midgard. She found the apartment of the woman named Jane Foster and knocked on the door. She was a warrior and this was a security concern, a war front, a threat to the kingdom. (This was a sniper’s sight line straight to her best friend’s heart, and Sif could not let that go unchecked. She had had too many friends bleed out at her feet).

“I want to understand you,” said Sif. “You are very close to him. You are very important, and I do not understand why Thor would—” She cut herself off, glowering carefully.

“Fall for a squishy little thing like me?” said Jane. “Let me know when you figure it out.”

“If you hurt him,” said Sif.

“I won’t,” Jane said. “I wouldn’t, I mean, he matters to me, too, Si—Lady Sif.” Jane fluttered her hands over the table top. “I’m not Loki,” she said finally.

“That is not—”

“Yes it is,” said Jane. “And you’re right, I saw the New York footage, too, every bit I could find. Thor let him get too close. He forgives people. He trusts them and he bleeds for it. But I’m not going to stab him in the stomach, Sif. I’m not his brother.”

Jane looked at her over a stack of flatcakes soaked in liquid sugar and waved her hands to make her points. Sif tried the acidic drink in the ceramic mug. She had come here to talk about Thor, but Jane asked about Frigga. “I want to understand her,” Jane said. “I need to know.”

Sif had a feeling that if she asked Jane if she felt like she fit in her skin, the scientist would not understand the question. Jane lived outside her skin, further and further afield, as far out and as close in as her sparking mind could imagine.

Sif went back to Asgard with a lighter heart. She took Thor out drinking after his diplomacy was over and two weeks later Jane joined them in Asgard for good.

Sif had worried Jane would be underfoot, hanging on Thor’s bright cloak and getting in the way of their practices and missions. It was Thor who had to seek Jane out, however, not the other way around. Sif might have thought the human woman only loved Thor for his science if she hadn’t seen the way Jane’s face lit up when she turned to him.

Jane was eating the universe whole, claiming and discovering and devouring, and leaving it undamaged in her wake.

 

“You grieve Frigga, my king,” said Sif, as she paused to pick up orders from Odin’s massive, kingly study. Odin’s pen paused over parchment. Sif steeled her nerves, which were already mostly iron. “And you also mourn your son.” She was not sure if she meant it to be a condolence or a question.

“He was not my son,” said Odin, and that should have told Sif right there that this was not the man she thought he was. Odin had always been much better at learning to hate the things he thought were _his_ than learning to let them go. “Do you think he deserved to be mourned, Lady Sif?”

“It doesn’t matter what Loki deserved.”

“Do you mourn him?”

Sif’s tongue felt swollen in her mouth. She swallowed dryly. “This palace was once filled with light,” she said. Odin waited for her to finish her answer, but Sif just picked up the stack of papers. “Is there anything else, my king?”

“Yes,” said the godling wearing Odin’s face. “Do you mourn him, Sif?”

Sif thought about all the answers she could give. She said, “I swore my sword to you, my king, not my griefs.” She bowed, and left.

 

Sif got the news of Lorelei’s escape in the middle of a meeting on agricultural regulations. She had been making little jokes to herself all afternoon about going back to her roots.

A messenger passed her the folded piece of paper. Sif read it and left the meeting room with only a nod, not even stopping to gather up her notes and documents.

She had been planning on taking Jane and her intern out with Thor and the Warriors Three that evening. It was still odd to her how it did not feel odd, letting Jane and Darcy step among the specters of old, lost friends. They were part of this odd new life and Sif was letting Darcy lean on Lorelei’s favorite barstool, letting Jane trace her fingers over the graffiti a fidgety Baldur had once left on a back table.

Sif went down the Bifrost with only what she could carry. Heimdall squeezed her shoulder once before he sent her down to Earth, after Lorelei, after a war criminal she’d already caught once, after a ghost she would never stop chasing.

She found Lorelei’s trail in the same desert dust that Thor had once died in.

The team the Midgardians had sent to greet her seemed competent enough, even with their antiquated technology. It was a rather uncomfortable shock to find Coulson, whose death Thor had spoken of with heavy sorrow, alive. When Thor had died and come back, he had come back a better, graver man. When Loki had died, he had come back wasted, twisted, sharp. What had this Coulson returned as?

Sif tried her best to explain the situation to them. When Lorelei took one of their warriors, a man named Ward, she drew Agent May aside. “I have been where you are, Melinda May. A man I care for under her spell,” said Sif and her tongue tripped over Baldur’s name. “So enchanted he forsook his family, his friends. Me. Steel yourself to do what might be necessary.”

“Ward won’t kill me,” said May.

“Don’t let your feelings cloud your judgment.”

“I’m not,” said May. “He might _try_ to kill me. But he won’t.”

Sif smiled; not joy and not quite approval, but recognition.

When they caught Lorelei. her beautiful face was filled with scorn. She begged for mercy. Sif put the silencing collar on her and took her home. This time, when they locked her away, Sif watched.

 

Lorelei was nothing but air and light. Loki was those same insipid trickeries—but so was Heimdall.

Her brother’s bones were iron, sure, but his life was dedicated to sight, to wonder and faraway galaxies. Frigga had been the greatest good Sif could imagine, but all her might was drawn up in her wisdom, her grace, her words. Her swordplay was an afterthought.

Sif had worked so long to be nothing but the bladed staff in her hands. She had tried to make that the point of her: this armor, her lifted chin, her loyalty. Words were for liars, for tricksters and villains, she had thought.

Frigga could have quieted a whole room with an even sentence. Thor, her brave, beautiful Thor, had grown into twice the man he’d ever been when he learned to use words before violence. He'd stepped out onto that dusty New Mexico street, no weapons, just words of surrender and sacrifice heavy on his tongue.

 

“It’s like Loki’s magic fairy doom stick thing,” said Darcy, when Sif returned and explained what had dragged her away. “Except all Lorelei needs is her voice.” 

“And it only works on men,” said Sif.

Jane frowned. “Just men?  _Just men_? But how would that even work? Clearly it’s not about sex, or romantic attraction, because that’s hardly universal in males.”

“Yes,” agreed Sif. “If it was simply potential for attraction then I would have been caught in her spell along with— my friend.”

“You can say Thor, it’s clearly Thor,” said Darcy. “Ooh, wait. What?”

“It was not Thor,” said Sif. “We had another battle comrade. Baldur. We lost him to Lorelei in the final years of battle.”

“Years?” whispered Jane.

“Our lives are longer than yours. Years do not mean the same thing to us.” Each millisecond of those bloody days was still aching in the proud lines of Sif’s shoulders.

“Testosterone?” offered Darcy lazily. She had gone back to thumbing through her iPhone, looking thoughtful.

“Testosterone and estrogen are present in both males and female—and gender’s a spectrum anyway.” Jane had her hands in her hair. “And what about transgender men? What about intersex people? What about—”

Despite Jane’s most vehement science rants, Odin refused to allow her access to Lorelei for tests.

“Understanding how Lorelei works would be an advantage if we ever had to face her or another with her powers in war,” Thor said. Sif noticed that he didn’t say it where anyone but she could hear it.

“You simply want your lady Jane to stop muttering about it,” Sif told him. Quietly, however, she agreed. Quietly, she wondered.

Jane and Heimdall holed up by the Bifrost, scribbling at walls and talking half to each other, a third to themselves, and the rest to the universe. For all their shared drive to learn, though, it was the other Migardian who reminded Sif most of her brother.

Darcy hunted Sif down the next day. Normally it was the other way around—Sif dragged Jane out of her studies to eat, and her intern sometimes tagged along.

Sif wasn’t sure what Darcy had wanted. Lurid war stories? Gossip about Lorelei? But Darcy wanted to know about the casualties of Sif’s wars. She wanted to know about Sif’s griefs.

Sif felt words pile on her tongue, and for the first time in centuries she let them out.

"Baldur was almost exiled once," said Sif, three stories and two cups of tea into the afternoon. Darcy’s eyes flicked to the passing crowd, to the glowing phone screen, and only occasionally to Sif’s face.

"Ooh, you like the bad boys?" said Darcy.

Sif smiled. "We had been heading to battle but he had slipped away from us—not quite a desertion, but Odin can be strict. Baldur had seen a baby bird get knocked from a nest due to our passage, you see, and he had gone to put it back. Baldur had a very soft heart."

Darcy was impossible. She was bored, lazy, and loud. She had an earbud in at inappropriate times and chewed gum in cathedrals.

But Darcy knew how to dangle a storm in front of Jane's eyes when she wanted her attention. Darcy looked straight through you but she saw everything anyway. She was jokes and eye rolls and she had followed Jane to the end of the universe. Calling it "on a whim" didn't seem right but it didn't seem wrong either.

On her first meeting with Odin the first words out of Darcy’s mouth were “what happened to your eye, dude?"

Odin's response was luckily neither to demand her exile or her death. Sif, at the end of her patience then, thought exile might have been alright actually, though by the time a few weeks had passed she'd absorbed enough of Darcy's humor to find the memory funny. 

That Odin's response to a petty mortal’s blatant disrespect was not more severe than a quirked brow should have warned Sif. Looking back she realized she should have known then that the man on the throne was not her king. 

(That the true Odin's response would have been death or exile for rolled eyes from a girl with a good heart and a may fly's lifespan—that also should have told Sif something about the man she thought she was serving).

As it was, Sif discovered the truth somewhat differently.

It was in the same throne room where Loki had once pinned a man with a knife for daring to try to strike his father. It was a little thing that shredded his ploy—a tic, a gesture, a phrase. All the disconnects came thudding into Sif’s mind. She had her brother’s eyes and she had seen this, seen this, and refused to listen to herself until now.

“Loki,” Sif said. “What have you done?” On this same floor, Odin had once given her the title of _warrior_ and Sif had grasped the sword in her hands then and thought _and what use is that?_

“Thor abdicated. Odin is gone." Loki spread his elegant fingers wide. He’d snapped his fingers and from the way the guards at the doors hadn’t moved, she knew he’d shielded them from sound and sight of them. "I am the rightful king."

"And that's why you're wearing Odin's face?" As she said it, Odin’s visage sluiced away from Loki’s sharp, shadowed face. Sif’s mouth felt dry, her tongue swollen, and she swallowed hard.

Loki chuckled, eyes tracking her hand to see if she was reaching for her sword. "That's just my old games. You know them well, Sif. You used to play them with me. Come now, Sif, you’ve been my liegeman for years now. Isn’t Asgard thriving? Isn’t Thor breathing? Haven’t I made a fine king?”

“You’re a murderer. I won’t serve you, Loki.”

He lifted an open hand, smiling paternally, like she’d never wrestled him into a fountain for being a smug little jerk and putting jelly in her favorite boots. “No one wants you, Sif. No one _sees_ you. But I have always respected you. Thor treats you like a pet. Odin treated you like a good little cog in a machine. But I have seen the power in you and I would treat you with the respect that power deserves.”

“I don't need your respect,” Sif spat.

She saw his face go dark. His hands closed and his shoulders drew in from their open stance. His mouth twisted with scorn. “Death dealer, killer, goddess of war. Do you think you have any place in cleaner hands than mine?”

She twirled her weapon lazily, with Darcy's pointed disinterest, Jane's precision, and Frigga's most dangerous smile. "I'm an earth goddess, don’t you remember? Growing things. Burrowing my roots deep. Cursing blights," she said and blocked the shot he threw at her.

 

It was a new war and an old friend’s face. Sif counted names and faces as she ran through the halls, sorting warriors into Loki’s camp and her own, tracking locations and strengths.

The Warriors Three were sleeping off hangovers. Jane would be in the Bifrost with Heimdall and Thor would be with them. Darcy was somewhere in the city, unguarded, unprotected—but Darcy was a clever girl, and Loki, the fool, would think her harmless, worthless, an ant.

Sif remembered Lorelei was in a cage far belowground. Sif remembered that Odin, that _Loki_ , had refused to let them near her.

 _Be brave_ whispered the ghost of a young girl who had once held her loyalty out in her delicate hands.

“I will,” said Sif. “For me.” She ran. She twisted her blade in her hands. She was a goddess of the earth and this was her place to stand.

If Sif could not save this ground, she would bleed on it. She would give it life, one way or another.


End file.
